What We're Reading

After her husband and four of her children are brutally murdered in the winter of 1897, midwife Elspeth Howell, along with her surviving son, twelve-year-old Caleb, takes on the frozen wilderness to find the men responsible for shattering their family.

The story of newlyweds, Edward and Florence Mayhew, both virgins on their wedding night, struggling through their internal battles with sexual anxiety and their vying expectations of what their relationship should be.

Kurlansky tells the story of how the codfish has shaped human history. Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been based on it, economies and livelihoods have depended on it, and the settlement of North America was driven by it. Truly engrossing.

Kick Lannigan, a victim of child abduction, pairs up with the mysterious Bishop to investigate a series of child disappearances in the Portland area. Bishop is convinced that Kick's experiences and expertise can be mined to help rescue the abductees. Little does Kick know the case will lead directly into her terrifying past.

In the comics boom of the 1940s, a legend was born: the Green Turtle. He solved crimes and fought injustice just like the other comics characters. But this mysterious masked crusader was hiding something more than your run-of-the-mill secret identity: the Green Turtle was the first Asian American super hero. The comic had a short run before lapsing into obscurity, but Gene Luen Yang has revived this character in Shadow Hero, a new graphic novel that creates an origin story for the Green Turtle.

When three daunting dolls intersect with one hapless heroine and a hard-boiled private eye, deception, betrayal, and murder stalk every mean street. Jules Feiffer, well known for his Village Voice cartoons, created this tribute to film noir.

Charles Todd introduced protagonist Bess Crawford in A Duty to the Dead. The dedicated World War I nurse returns in An Impartial Witness, and finds herself in grave peril when a moral obligation makes her the inadvertent target of a killer. An Impartial Witness transports readers to a dark time of war and involves us in murder, intrigue, and the fascinating affairs of a truly unforgettable cast of characters.

No longer content to lay eggs on command only to have them carted off to the market, a hen glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild--and to hatch an egg of her own. A bestseller in the author's homeland of Korea.

The photography provides the first significant portrait of these charismatic animals west of the Cascades and the British Columbia Coast Range. His accounts of young wolves at play, and the stories that shed light on the psychological power wolves have across cultures and generations, make this a true wilderness adventure.

"All You Need is Less is about realistically adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle without either losing your mind from the soul-destroying guilt of using a plastic bag because you forgot your reusable ones in the trunk of your car (again), or becoming a preachy know-it-all whom everyone loathes from the tips of her organically-shampooed hair to the toes of her naturally sourced recycled sandals. It's all gotten kind of complicated, hasn't it? These days you're not 'green' enough unless you quit your day job and devote your entire life to attaining an entirely carbon neutral lifestyle or throw out all of your possessions and replace them with their new 'green' alternatives. This whole eco-friendly thing seems to have devolved into a horrific cycle of guilt, shaming and one-upping, and as a result people are becoming exhausted and getting annoyed and, oh my god, we are living in a world where one of my grocery bags says 'This reusable bag makes me better than you.' It doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to take easy baby-steps towards a more earth-friendly lifestyle without stress, guilt, or judgy eco-shaming.
Submitted by Stacey